Thanks for this.
One of the driving forces of instability in the world is the drug
laws in consuming countries, especially the US. They wreak havoc in
the US itself, largely because they act as a price support for
narcotics and other drugs. If they were decriminalized, even if, as
often claimed, there would be a few new addicts, medical and law
enforcement costs, the social costs of criminalizing every day
activities, and the costs to our foreign policy, would more than
offset this. Consider just the latter. We export our drug wars,
plunging the Andean countries into civil wars and spreading chaos in
others (see below). We create the conditions that allow the Taliban
to buy massive amounts of weapons to slaughter other Afghans and Nato
troops. In a lot of places, we subsidize.both sides--we pay rebels to
keep fighting by keeping drug costs up, and we pay governments to
suppress the rebels.
If we were to decriminalize, the economies of some countries,
Colombia among them, would collapse. Better to subsidize those
economies in less destructive ways. The individual producers would
probably be no worse off--they could still sell their crops, but
there'd be no exorbitant profits for the various corrupt governments
and mafias.
Imagine the improvement in lives, and not just for the addicts, if a
fix or a lid cost a buck or two and the quality were regulated.
I just got this from my friend Heriberto Yepez in Tijuana. He and I
used to joke about the exaggerations of the American media, which
portrayed the border region as a free-fire zone. Certainly there were
cartel-related shootings and the occasional assassinations of
political figures and journalists, but in a city of 2 million these
had little effect on the daily lives of people. The current Mexican
government decided to stamp out the drug trade, which funds a lot of
the corruption that hampers Mexican prosperity. That's a difficult
way to accomplish what a change in US drug laws would accomplish in a
heartbeat. And it's unleashed all the demons.
Here's Heriberto's email. I disagree with his conclusion, but his
testimony is horrifying.
The "leyenda negra" is the standard anglophone narrative about the
evils of Spanish colonial rule as opposed to a supposed English
colonial benevolence. A tambo is an oill drum. Pozole is
hominy--boiled cow corn--a common Mexican food.
>News on Tijuana are no exaggeration now... they used to be 'leyenda
>negra' but not anymore. In the last weeks I've seen 6 bodies of dead
>people in the streets. Just last week, 60 meters from my new address
>3 people were killed. We even heard the guns (AK47). And where I
>used to live, two months ago I saw big blue "tambos" (don't know
>what's the word for those cointainers in English) with dead people
>inside of sulfuric acid. The tambos had a paper that said "Pozole"
>
>"Pozole" is now the way they killed people--in acid...
>
>Last month 170 people were executed by narcos--who are they? narcos?
>people who accuse them? nobody is sure... And the authorities don't
>say anything and the press doesn't have any idea who precisaly is
>being killed--but just last weekend 6 people were killed in a bar
>two blocks from the university, and most of them were innocent
>clientes--students, so things are really getting out of control.
>Everybody that can is leaving Tijuana, house are being sold in
>numbers never before seen and in 'great' prices... And we don't have
>any idea when is this going to end, doesn't seem like it is going to end
>
>Night life is now almost dead--people don't even go to Turistico as
>they used to--so that maybe gives you and idea on the war right
>now--I'm somewhat happy because at least something is happening,
>somebody is fighting narcos now and that's why they became totally
>crazy and are now doing stupid stuff like killing people all over....
At 04:58 AM 12/3/2008, you wrote:
>I just came across this article on medical uses of marijuanna. It may be
>a interest given the poetics of the arguments.
>
>http://www.drugpolicy.org/library/manderson2.cfm
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